Tumescent Dueling Phallic Flags in Laredo, Texas USA and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico

...a quick newsbreak from Laredo, Texas where I am hiding out from my job as Chair of literature.sdsu.edu and touring in support of Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America.

There are Freudian flags dueling here in Laredo--a massive Peter North-esque American flag on the Laredo side; and an even more, um, tumescent John Holmes-esque flag towering over los dos laredos on the Mexican side of the border in Nuevo Laredo. More here as well.

When I get back to San Diego next week I will try to post pictures and a little film of this semiotic, warring crossing of the swords, here deep in the penumbra, or, the pudenda, of South Texas.

Holy nationalist erection, batsman!

"Next Stop Cucamonga": A Texas & California Odyssey!

Every now and then someone slips up and leaves the cell-door open and a professor gets to excape her or his host asylum to hit the road and go "on tour," sort of speak.

Ok, it's not quite the Frampton Comes Alive tour or Cheap Trick, Live at Budakan sans groupies, but it's as close as us mortar-board wearing, would-be / wanna-be, band-on-the-run, robe & hood sporting wonks are gonna get to that legendary life of tour-buses, champagne, and debauchery.

So it is with great pleasure that I let slip to occasional readers and random image-safari visitors that I am visting Austin (The University of Texas at Austin, UT, November 1), San Antonio (The University of Texas at San Antonio, UTSA, November 5), Los Feliz (at Skylight Books, November 7), Los Angeles (The University of Southern California, USC, November 8), and Santa Cruz (at the Felix Kulpa Gallery, The University of California, Santa Cruz, UCSC, December 7) in support of Tex[t]-Mex.

If you are near one of the readings come out and say hola! Mil gracias a La Bloga for the shout-out regarding this tour!

The poster (below) that Michael Buchmiller did for the Texas gigs is nothing short of amazing--gracias to genius Buchmiller for his savvy graphic eye. Guillermo Nericcio García, rogue, semiotic, imagemeister from memogr@phics designcasa, came up with one as well (left) for the USC reading. Each appears here in living color.

Arrivaderci!

The New York Times Weighs in on Tex-Mex...

... cooking! not my book--still waiting on that one!

Eagle-eyed colleague, June Cummins-Lewis, tipped my eyes to this cool piece in Manhattan's finest fish-rap--a veritable paean to Tex-Mex food. Check it out.

First Rita Hayworth and Electrolysis and now Che Guevara's Lock of Hair

The Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog already has enough problems dodging the taunts of "hair fetishist" from unruly readers what with my ongoing archeology of Rita Hayworth's use of electrolysis in her transformation from Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino. Now, Che Guevara's hair enters the picture as the BBC is reporting that a lock of the revolutionary's and Chicana/o poster child's hair is up for auction. Next thing you know Speedy Gonzales will star in a short animated feature with a bikini wax!

The dark side of all this follicular frivolity? Go here.

Trafficking in Relics: The "Bones" of Saint Rita Hayworth, Sor Lupe Vélez et al

The Lupe Vélez chapter of Tex[t]-Mex sets up an argument that I will try to expand in Eyegiene, a follow-up collection of essays on the seductive hallucination of visual culture in America. Building on medievalist Jeffrey Hamburger's work on Saint Veronica, "Veronika," and/or vera icon (icon), I try to map the matrix wherein the ecstatic spirituality and greed (never a mutually exclusive pairing) that drive relic-markets of the medieval period (the fetishistic trafficking in the bones, fingernails, hair, etc of departed saints) evolve. Now, here in the present, centuries later, living in a time wherein the gods and God have been evicted by the findings of Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, and Freud (The Four Horsemen of the tail-end of the 19nth Century), all that spirituality, all that ecstacy, all that lu$t need some outlet, some release, some jouissance damn it to hell, and they loving saints of old find themselves replaced in a constellation/cluster-fuck of loathing and loving by Celebrities, of all people!
In this sordid, eyegienic scenario, Lady Diana of Great Britain cameos for the Virgin Mary; Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and Lindsay Lohan, pudenda akimbo, have bit parts as proxies for Mary Magdalene, someone who really knew her way around the block;

Walker Percy's notion of "certification" gets close to nailing the intricacies of this process. In his under-rated novel The Moviegoer, the main characters, "Binx" Bolling and his cousin/lover Kate, try to find meaning in their lives.

Binx, channeling Percy (to whom we owe mucho thanx for rescuing Confederacy of Dunces from the dust heap of history) tells how newsreels and television can give one that sought for meaning in life by "certifying" your existence. For example, you don't really exist until a pan of the camera on a news story reveals your house to you on the boob tube--in an odd way, the corpses of houses televised today in San Diego are somehow certifying the existence of select, suffering, watching viewers/victims.

The waning mobs on MySpace and waxing hoards on Facebook, are, caught up in this somehow as well. In any event, as you may have noticed, I am as big a sucker for celebrity relics as any other doofus, and I happen to have web sentinels that let me know when a "good buy" hits the market. Like this one, of Rita Hayworth, by George Hurrell, from 1941:



Or this one, of Rita, just after Orson Welles changed her hair for The Lady from Shanghai.

This last one, of Carole Lombard, also by Hurrell's studio, is a mini-allegory/parable on celebrity and the sacred, narcissism and semiotics all by itself:

On a side note, the passion of these warring medievalists for their field is bracing!

And the Shade of Baudrillard Keeps on Laughing, Borges's Too, at Baudrillard for Stealing his Schtick...

When I first moved to San Diego and would go to "Old Town"--a facsimile of old San Diego as imagined by Disney dreaming of Grenada (it has since been ruined by Gringos from Delaware and I actually miss it)--I would joke that I now knew what a real mouse must feel like walking through Disneyland. Something like that, in reverse, is happening now as chains of Taco Bell "restaurants" are poised to enter the Mexican market. AdAge is on the story of simulacras, tortillas, and brown, spicy meat-esque paste.

Mexican Jesus, Depeche Mode, Latino Semioticity, and Lázaro Lima

I just got a cyberpostcard from Lázaro Lima of New York, author of The Latino Body, pointing me to some fine anti-iconoclastic doings down in San Antonio where I am lecturing at UTSA on November 5, 2007. No doubt some church site/sightseeing is in this Mexican's future!

Lima's meditation on "Personal Jesus" as Depeche Mode's "Chicanesca cultural intervention" is a keeper--the video rocks as well! It's funny that I had wiped the memory of Depeche Mode's song from my head when it is so visually in harmony with the whole Tex[t]-Mex project.

Gracias Lázaro!

The Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog Silenced!

update to original 9/21/07 posting!
source


Regular reader and contributor David O. Garcia sends me an email enquring innocently if I am "familiar with the giant Mexican caricature at the North Carolina/South Carolina border? Here is the website."

Sweet Mother of God--I don't know if I should call them to sell my book or book a charter flight over there for a month-long anthropological investigation. Pedroland with its iconic sleeping "Mexican" leaves me speechless! More soon! The Giant Sombrero--egads!


UPDATE

Equally hard to take? Be sure to read the pitch to buy.

Manuel Noriega's Red Underwear and the New Adventures of Juan Valdez

Back in the day in Connecticut, when the vision of Tex[t]-Mex was just a sparkle in its Daddy's eye, I remember giving papers at conferences on the vagaries of the Colombian Coffee Growers' Federation icon Juan Valdez and the covert labyrinthine erotics (including CIA psychological operations) of Manuel Noriega's red underwear--thematic predilections that signaled all that was to come, silly, comedic, and serious, in my peculiar academic career. "Valdez," the one I grew up with, was a curious chap, played by an actor named Carlos Sánchez, and whose voice was dubbed by Norman Rose. What was most curious about this Latino icon was that Sánchez was Panamanian not Colombian (cue here the fading shade of Jean Baudrillard wagging his finger, epithets of "simulacra" exiting his mug). That's when things got really gnarly--"Panama" was part of "Colombia" until the U.S. government intervened and started pulling strings here and there in order to pull off and profit from the Panama Canal deal. I had always meant to write up that conference talk, a nightmare rich in the kind of ironies--especially with regard to U.S. foreign policy--that keep you up at night.

So it was with nostalgic pleasure today that I opened my StumbleUpon browser and found a missive from Professor Michael Harper, my co-conspirator at Mount San Antonio College, who tips me to this timely story of the NEW adventures of Juan Valdez!

Ethnic mannequins of the world, unite! The video on the 2nd page is a priceless concoction worthy of Faulkner, Dali or Buñuel.

Halloween is around the Corner and...

Halloween is a around the corner! What self-respecting reader of the Tex[t]-Mex Galleryblog would want to be caught OUT of this costume available over the drink from the UK. Holy steenkin badges Batman!

Tip of the Sombrero: Charles Ramirez-Berg

On November 1, 2007 at 4pm, I am going to be reading from Tex[t]-Mex at the Cactus Cafe in good old Austin, Texas, in the heart of campus at the Texas Union. If the gods are kind and he doesn't have a class maybe I will finally get to thank Charles Ramirez-Berg for the help he gave me in researching early Hollywood filmed representations of Mexicans in U.S. cinema. In particular, he shared his primary research film dubs of several of the early Greaser film shorts that were the rage for Americans before 1920--the introduction to my book, provided by UT Press online, documents these "classics." In any event, Ramirez-Berg is a legend at UT and beyond, and this recent feature by the University on his work is worth a careful perusal. A tip of the Sombrero and un abrazo fuerte to Professor Ramirez-Berg.

USC

I am invading USC on November 8, 2007 for a talk at one of their residential colleges. Here's a graphic by Guillermo Nericcio García for the reading, signing, and lecture.

¡Subterranean Exhibitionists!
"Mexicans" in the Voyeuristic Eyes of "Americans"
Parkside Senior Common Room
Thursday, November 8, 2007 @ USC
Parkside International Residential College

Dinner begins at 6:30 in the Parkside Senior Common Room, with the presentation/discussion from 7:15-7:45. From 7:45 to 8:30 there will be a dessert reception

Swarthy Speedy Gonzales Shilling Enchiladas

It was the early 1990s and unbeknownst to me, travailing in an Eastern Connecticut land grant university, Tyson Foods came out with a line of Looney Tunes tv-dinners. One of these, touting enchiladas, featured the loving mug of our good friend Speedy Gonzales. You can read about it here--a high-res image of the box is also available here on your right.

What's most curious about this box is just how dark and brown Speedy becomes in this incarnation of his corporate-America-forged "Mexican" being. Something about hawking sub-edible frozen culinary delights moved the hand of his marketers to give Speedy something akin to the brown-face applied to Charlton Heston in Orson Welles's' Touch of Evil. Commonly, he does not appear this way--especially not in his heydays during the 1960s. Just more to worry about as we attempt to parse the evolution of stereotypes in the good ol' USA.

Mel Blanc: The Voice that Launched a Thousand Types

Drawn. ca via neatorama via youtube is broadcasting a very cool interview with Mel Blanc, the voice of Speedy Gonzales, the Frito Bandito, Bugs Bunny, Sylvester and hundreds of other memorable cartoon characters for Warner Brothers and other companies. I get asked a lot at readings if I hate Speedy Gonzales and Warner Brothers for all of the stereotypes they popularized in their short, animated classics and I always say 'please read the book.' My "Autopsy of a Rat" is a cloaked love letter to Friz Freleng, Robert McKimson, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and the thousands of artists and technicians that changed the face of animated entertainment for the ages. One of Blanc's Mexican character-voices appears towards the end of the video, part of a bit he developed with Jack Benny for his variety show--his "Mexican" is no dope either as this schtick is complex. The gnarly threads binding the fates of Jewish American animators and Mexican-American subjectivity are the true object under analysis in "Autopsy of a Ray" and in Text[t]-Mex. The least interesting question to put here is whether Freleng, Blanc, et al were racists--does Pepe Le Peu besmirch the psyche of your average Frenchman? The more interesting question and the ongoing challenge for those of us who travail in cultural studies is how race and ethnicity (and gender and sexuality) weave there way into every aspect of what passes for entertainment.



More Benny/Blanc Mexicanesque schtick here...



and here....

Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino, aka Rita Hayworth, Mistress of Electrolysis

I remember writing the first draft of "When Electrolysis Proxies for the Existential" on a plane on my way out to Purdue for their then annual Romance Languages conference. I was reading a biography of Rita Hayworth at the time (guilty pleasures that double as scholarly research) and had run across amazing revelations regarding Hayworth (née Cansino) and her father (incest!) and Hayworth and her "barber" (electrolysis to lift her hairline), both dispatches couriered to my eyes courtesy of Barbara Leaming--Time reviewed the book back in 1989.

Latina bombshell? Spanish femme fatale? The mysteries of Margarita metamorphosis take up the better part of 40 pages in Tex[t]-Mex in a chapter entitled "When Electrolysis Proxies for the Existential: A Somewhat Sordid Meditation on What Might Occur if Frantz Fanon, Rosario Castellanos, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, and Sandra Cisneros Asked Rita Hayworth Her Name at the Tex[t]-Mex Beauty Parlor."

Here's a snippet of Cansino/Hayworth in living color from Blood and Sand (dir. R. Mamoulian; 1941). Count the number of fused "Spanish"/"Latina" tropes in the clip--here's a hint: can you say "bullfighting"?


Lovely Rita! What a curious clip--shades of Almodovar's Matador.

A last note on Rita-archeology: I recently ran across a book-length work focused wholly on Hayworth/Cansino published by Adrienne L. Mclean for Rutgers University Press--a scan of it off Amazon reveals a more than decent take on the Alzheimer-felled star.

postscript

Let me state here in public and for the record that the only reason Tex[t]-Mex EVER appeared in print, aside from nagging, utterly welcome, periodic chingasos from Davíd Carrasco, was the support and encouragement of Arturo J. Aldama, killer of many trees for all the books he has published in the fields of ethnic studies and cultural studies, and editor, in particular, of Violence and the Body, where the existentialism/electrolysis piece finally got published the way I had imagined it in the first place--snapshot to your right. While the Rita chapter in Tex[t]-Mex is extensively revised and features many new Hayworth pictures, it has to be said that without the Arturo Aldama, my UT Press opus would never have seen the light of day. Gracias con un abrazo fuerte a Profe Aldama!